Spectacular Falls

In my "Embarrassing First Dates" threads, Gail (how are you, Gail?) mentioned walking into a bin. And this got me thinking about spectacular falls.

A buddy of mine, Mick, was off to the seargent's mess in Poole for a drink. His wife, Maggie, who once tried to kill him by turning the electric blanket up full blast and chucking a bucket of water over his sleeping form, said, "Whatever you do, don't get into a punch up."

"I won't, Mag, I promise."

He was true to his word.

However, wandering home with a glow on and his hands in his pockets, he trod on a little pebble that put him off balance, causing him to stumble a couple of steps.

Now normally, if you're walking down the road with your hands in your pockets, you can pull them out easy enough. But because he was pissed and because he'd stumbled a couple of steps, he just seemed to be pulling upwards on the lining of his pockets, which caused him to run a few more steps.

He was on a slope.

You know those falls when you keep righting yourself, almost falling, righting yourself, almost falling again and so on?

Well this was Mick, until he eventually found himself ruinning down this hill, completely potatoed, with both his hands in his pockets. He knew he was in trouble but could do nothing about it except to aim for a bit of grass at the bottom.

Which he overshot.

He landed on his face in the middle of the street.

"@!#$ hell. Maggie's going to kill me."

He managed to get his shirt off without getting too much blood on it, and the first words he said to Maggie when she opened the door to him were, "Maggie, I wasn't fighting. Honest."

Maggie, trooper that she is, bent him down over the bathroom sink to clean him up. "Close your eyes," she said. And while Mick had his eyes closed tipped a whole bottle of TCP onto a flannel and slapped it on his grazed face.

True story.

What spectacular falls have you had? Or witnessed.